Run: 2026-10-09-01M4G16VNDRZP8AAWPTAK9H7RH

The path ended where the streetlamps gave up. Rory stood at the edge of the bracken with her hands buried in the pockets of her coat and listened to the park go quiet around her. Richmond at midnight should not have been this quiet. Somewhere behind her, beyond the tree line, a car hissed along the Robin Hood Gate road, and then even that sound thinned and vanished, as if someone had closed a door on it. She checked her phone. 11:52. She checked again a minute later, after she had counted to sixty twice under her breath, and it read 11:52 still. "Right," she said to nobody. Her voice sounded flat and small. "Fine." The note had been waiting in her delivery bag when she came off shift at the Golden Empress, tucked between a pair of chopstick sleeves and a receipt for spring rolls. Cream card, no envelope, handwriting so neat it looked typed. *Come to the grove before the frost. Bring what she gave you.* No signature. She had nearly thrown it in the bin behind Yu-Fei's kitchen. Instead she had stood in the alley for a full minute with the card in her fingers, and then she had gone home, sat on the edge of her bed above Silas' bar, and pulled the silver chain from the back of her drawer. The Heartstone pendant lay in her palm now, no bigger than her thumbnail, the crimson stone dark as wine. It had been warm for an hour. Not warm the way metal gets from a body; warm the way a cup of tea is warm in the second before you drink it, steady and patient. Since she'd stepped off the path, it had begun to pulse, faint and slow, like something breathing under a blanket. She closed her fingers over it and walked on. The grove announced itself by the stones. There were seven of them, or at least seven she could see, rising out of the ground in a rough ring between the oaks. They were not carved. They were not quite natural either. Their faces had been worn smooth by something other than weather, and the oaks that stood among them were older than any tree she had ever seen, their trunks split and furrowed like the knuckles of an old man. Between the roots, wildflowers grew. Foxglove. Blue speedwell. Clusters of pale yellow primrose, open wide and glowing as though it were June. It was late October. Frost had been on the windscreens that morning. Rory crouched and touched a primrose. The petals were cool and damp, real enough. She let her thumb rest against the stem and felt, beneath the skin of the plant, a faint tremor, like a pulse. Behind her, a twig snapped. She stood too fast and her knee cracked. She turned slowly, pendant clenched in her fist, scanning the trunks. Nothing. Only the stones, pale in the starlight, and the darkness pooling between the oaks like water. "Hello?" she said. The grove swallowed the word. No echo came back. She told herself it was a deer. Richmond had deer, great shouldering things that wandered out of the bracken without a sound. She told herself that as she took a step toward the nearest stone, and then another, and as she heard her own footfall come back to her a fraction late, as if the ground were repeating her steps after a moment's hesitation. She stopped. The repeated footfall stopped too. She waited. She counted. Four seconds, five, six. Then, very softly, from somewhere beyond the ring, a child began to hum. It was an old tune. Rory knew it, or half-knew it, the way you know a lullaby from a childhood you can't quite remember. The melody rose and fell, unhurried, and every few bars it broke off and started again from the beginning, as if the singer had lost the thread and was trying to find it. The sound moved. Once it was to her left, near the third stone. Then it was behind her. Then it seemed to be coming from the ground itself. Her pendant had stopped being warm. It was hot now, a dull pressure against her palm, pulsing in a rhythm that matched the humming and then, horribly, began to lead it. Rory opened her hand and looked at the stone. The crimson glow was brighter than it had been, a deep red light that seeped between her fingers and painted the veins of her wrist. The small crescent scar near her thumb looked white in that light, almost raised. Movement at the edge of her sight. Between the second and third oak, something pale slid behind a trunk. Not a deer. It had been too tall, and it had moved too smoothly, the way a reflection moves when you shift your head. She turned her eyes toward it and it was gone. She turned back to the stones and, from the corner of her vision, saw it again, standing exactly where it had been a moment before, closer now, unmoving, watching. She did not look directly at it. Some instinct older than thought told her that looking would be a kind of answer. "I came because I was asked to," she said, and was pleased that her voice did not shake. "I'm here. You can stop." The humming ceased. The silence that followed was total. Not a bird, not a leaf, not the faint hum of the city that had been there all her life. Even her heartbeat seemed to go quiet in her ears, leaving only the slow, patient pulse of the stone in her hand. Then, from directly behind her, close enough that she felt the breath move the hair at her neck, a voice she knew said her name. "Rory." It was Eva's voice. It was her own voice too, a half-second behind, the way the echo of her footsteps had been. She did not turn around. She stood very still, the Heartstone burning in her fist, and felt the grove lean inward around her, waiting to see what she would do.